Poets Circle (August)

Will Reger

Will Reger was born and raised in the St. Louis, Missouri area. He has been writing poetry since he was a child, and publishing poetry since 2010. He is currently the Poet Laureate for the City of Urbana and a founding member of the CU (Champaign-Urbana) Poetry Group (cupoetry.com). He has a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and currently teaches at Illinois State University in Bloomington-Normal, Illinois. He lives in Champaign, Illinois, with his wife, Mary, with whom he has raised four children. When he is not teaching or writing poetry, he collects flutes, plays flutes, and sometimes even writes poems about flutes. He can be found at https://twitter.com/wmreger.



Love on a Knoll

The adjunct Badger, heavy after class,
lay back on cool academic grass
(that knoll on the dark side of the quad)
to rest his eyes and ponder his lady love.
He wrote her poems, feeling himself a bard,
though these were verses she knew nothing of.

She was, as he knew, pragmatic and young,
in secretarial school, not one for fun.
For him, she was the torch that lit his nights.
Her sweater’s pulse, her ample skirt, her tights.
He loved the blue beacons of her eyes,
how they swiveled over her warm dunes.

He thought he wanted to collate her bones,
but he had papers to mark and a manuscript
on the seven compound tenses simplified
for the Freshman to be proofed and shipped.
He told himself to call but he hated phones.
Later, he drove by her dorm, terrified.